Everywhere you look, every place you go to in search of an
answer, you encounter the same refrain; you hear them say: he has no strategy.
These would be members of the chattering classes talking about the current
American President, Barack Obama who, in their eyes, has not developed a simple
mantra they can write on a bumper sticker and use as a prism through which to
see and interpret everything he says or does.
They would have liked to see, for example, something like:
“if you're not with us, you're against us” which is the mantra and belief to
which the previous President, George W. Bush, adhered from among the other
strategies and doctrines that the chattering classes failed to see, or did not
understand. One of these came to be called his doctrine after he left office,
consisting of the attempt to shove democracy the way he understood it, down the
throat of people in the Middle East who had
other ideas as to how they wished to be governed.
But what is this phenomenon of the chattering classes
capturing the same saying and repeating it as if each individual were not an
individual but a small part of one and the same wall standing in the echo
chamber of mindless monotony? Well, the way to explain this phenomenon is to attribute
the tendency to the principle of safety in numbers. It is that to say something
different and prove to be wrong guarantees your demise and removal from the
clan. But if you follow the animal instinct of “disappearing” among a herd of a
million others, the chances that you'll be caught and devoured by a predator
reduces to one in a million.
Well then, how does a saying come into existence before
being captured and bounced around by the herd of chattering classes? The best
way to see how this happens is to look at an example that's in the making. A
potential one is given by Reuel Marc Gerecht who wrote an article under the
title: “A Ballot-Box Test for the Palestinians” and the subtitle: “It's
fashionable to say that democracy won't work for the people who elected Hamas.
Let them try again.” It was published on August 15, 2014 in the Wall Street
Journal.
This is a piece in which Gerecht tries to revive the old
doctrine of George W. Bush – the one that has to do with spreading democracy in
the Middle East . But he seems to end up not
reviving the doctrine as much as creating a variation on it; one that has the
potential to become, if not a new doctrine, at least a mantra that could fit on
a bumper sticker. This one could well take on the allure of: Let them try
again.
He begins by saying that forcing the Palestinians to adopt
the democratic method of governance produced a Hamas victory which proved to be
a bad thing as can be attested by the three conflicts that erupted in Gaza between Hamas and Israel . He even goes as far as to
suggest that some people view the adoption of the Bush method as an “electoral
mistake.” He further explains that there are two opposing views as to whether
or not the experience should be repeated because hanging in the balance are two
possible outcomes generated by two powerful forces: “Would Hamas's jihadism
cost it more votes than its anti-Zionist steadfastness has gained? Would
Fatah's relative moderation offset its rampant corruption and its own
police-state oppression?”
He discusses the pros and cons of each side in this
apparently difficult equation by harking back to a similar experience; one that
unfolded in Turkey
– another Muslim country. But what he does now is argue the pros and cons as
being an internal battle taking place between secularism and religious
militancy. Alas, there too, the experience proved to be not such a good idea,
he says, because: “Force-feeding secularism didn't prevent, 90 years later, the
democratic triumph of an Islamist prime minister, who today has aligned Ankara with Hamas.”
Aiming to show in the end that: “It's questionable whether
Israeli concessions to Fatah would change the hostile dynamic between
Palestinian secularists and Islamists,” he goes into a long and rambling
presentation that allows him to conclude there is a better alternative to
Israel making concessions for peace: “A freely elected Palestinian parliament
can bless a permanent cessation of hostilities between Palestinian and
Israelis. Fatah's ruling elite, constantly nervous about its own legitimacy,
cannot.”
This being a positive note on which to discuss something
that concerns the Arab world, Gerecht found a way to inject negativity into the
presentation. He says the Arab world, especially Egypt
and Saudi Arabia ,
will not like the idea of holding free elections nearby, especially after the
experience of what he calls the “Great Arab Revolt” that caused “many Americans
to be wary and depressed about the Arab future.”